House Speaker Mike Johnson steps down from Republican leadership after midterm loss

House Speaker Mike Johnson is stepping down from Republican leadership.

The Louisiana Republican announced on Wednesday morning on an all-staff call that he will not run for House minority leader for the new Congress next year, following Tuesday's historical Democratic landslide takeover of the House of Representatives.

It's not clear yet if Johnson has anointed a successor to lead the Republican caucus. Representative Jim Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, has already thrown his hat into the ring and announced he's running for House minority leader. According to Punchbowl News, Jordan's pitch will be that new blood is needed and that he specializes in investigations.

The current number two Republican in the House, Representative Steve Scalise, also announced that he is running for caucus leader.

"Scalise will be announcing his run for Republican leader for the next Congress today," a source told The Washington Sun. "His number one goal will be to lead the conference back into the majority. He is a proven and tested leader who is ready on day one. He's spent his career unifying Republicans and he is prepared for the big legislative and oversight battles ahead. The conference knows him, how he fights, and that he's a trusted leader."

Johnson's tenure has been marked by his unwillingness to stand up to President Donald Trump, repeatedly playing dumb about new developments from the White House. Under Johnson's watch, Trump took away congressional authority from controlling funds and levying tariffs, and Johnson supported—either openly or by inaction—every piece of Trump's agenda. That proved to doom Republicans on Tuesday, and Johnson's successor will have to choose between protecting Trump by fighting against an overwhelming Democratic majority, or actually trying to help the American people.

This story has been updated.

Read more about the midterms:

• Democrats Take Control of the House of Representatives

Republicans Point Fingers at Trump After Midterm Bloodbath

After the Democrats' historic landslide victory on Tuesday, Republicans are looking for whom to blame, and uncharacteristically, they are openly pointing the finger at President Donald Trump.

"It sounds a little ironic," Republican Bobby Charles, who lost Maine's gubernatorial election, told Politico, "but I am nevertheless optimistic for the future because Trump's going to be gone in two years."

Matt Dole, chair of the Licking County Republican Party in Ohio, told the publication that "there's a little bit of a reckoning in the Republican Party about where they go."

"I think you're going to see a part of the Republican Party advocate for a return to normalcy, which is not repudiating Trump's ideology and policies, but will repudiate Trump's style," Dole said.

Licking County is a staunch Republican county in the Buckeye State.

Trump himself was defiant, calling Fox News around midnight to complain that the network's polls showed that he wasn't popular. In response, host Bret Baier pointed out that "tonight, actually, the results are pretty close to what the Fox polls showed."

Trump disagreed, saying, "Well, I don't know about that," and he maintained that he had the "greatest two years in the history of the presidency," despite the disastrous Iran war and faltering economy.

White House adviser Alex Bruesewitz said poor candidates were responsible for Republican losses, slamming them as "uninspiring, lazy, and thoroughly ineffective communicators." He specifically mentioned Georgia Representative Mike Collins's failed Senate campaign. But an unnamed Republican operative told Politico that candidate quality was a "lazy excuse."

"This is more than just one lazy candidate here. I mean, the chair of the … NRCC is losing his election," the operative said, referring to Representative Richard Hudson losing North Carolina's 9th congressional district to Democrat Richard Ojeda, the first Democrat to represent the district since 1963.

"We are beyond candidate quality. It's a bloodbath," another senior Senate GOP official told Politico. "Trump did this."

Read more about the midterms:

• Elon Musk Spirals Over His Failure to Buy Elections

Voters Reject Data Centers Across the Country

Election Day 2026 revealed just how much of the country loathes Silicon Valley's data center projects.

Communities across the nation voted on 41 data center-related ballot initiatives on Tuesday. The measures were introduced in California, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Nevada, New Jersey, North Dakota, Ohio, and Wisconsin.

At least 33 of those municipalities voted to keep data centers out, according to votes tracked by Data Centers on the Ballot. At least six localities specifically voted to ban data center construction and halt the development of all planned facilities. Just one measure in Harwood, North Dakota, counted as a victory for the industry, as voters decided against restricting data center construction.

The vast majority of the data center-related ballot initiatives were introduced and decided in Ohio, which has recently become a buzzing hub of activity for tech companies looking to build the water-zapping facilities. Over the last year, some of Silicon Valley's most prominent AI firms have poured millions of dollars into races across the state and on both sides of the aisle in an apparent effort to influence the region's politics.

Exactly why AI-backed money was funneled into the Ohio race boils down to a perfect confluence of factors across the state. Ohio has relatively cheap land, plentiful resources, and enough power plants to fuel the data centers required to support the AI industry's seemingly imminent boom.

But the same can be said for many other regions in the country. In Kansas, where land is similarly cheap and plentiful, voters adopted some of the most restrictive proposals on the table. One such measure banned the construction of "high-impact data centers" (facilities that use more than 100,000 gallons of water per day) for 10 years, stipulating that the decision could only be reversed by public vote, according to an analysis by Multistate.us.

Mounting evidence that the public actually hates data centers doesn't bode well for Donald Trump, who has spent months attempting to convince Americans to let the industry build as he cozies up to major tech executives.

Recent polling indicates that the vast majority of Americans, including Republicans, have no interest in permitting the tech industry to build AI facilities in their backyards. An August survey published by Heatmap revealed that 75 percent of the public opposes data center development in their communities.

More jurisdictions are expected to take a stance on the issue in the coming weeks. Voters in Arkansas and North Dakota will vote on whether to finance or prohibit data centers on December 1 and December 15, respectively.

Read more about data centers:

• Trump? Diesel? ICE? Corruption? All of Those. But Mostly—Data Centers.

Abortion Rights Win Big in Four States

Much like 2022, the 2026 midterm elections proved the majority of voters support reproductive rights and abortion access.

Four states had abortion on the ballot. Nevada and Virginia voted in favor of allowing abortions within state lines. Missouri voted against repealing a constitutional amendment supporting abortion access that was introduced via a ballot initiative in 2024. Idaho was the sole exception on Tuesday as voters sided against a citizen-initiated statute that would have enshrined abortion access as a statutory right.

Nevadans, Virginians, and Missourans voted 63 percent, 62 percent, and 55 percent, respectively. Idahoans, meanwhile, voted by 56 percent.

Since Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court's conservative supermajority in June 2022, abortion has become a nonstop losing streak for Republicans, pitting the party's long-standing policies against their increasingly dire ramifications.

States that enforced aggressive abortion restrictions saw medical brain drains, with large swaths of medical professionals moving elsewhere. Other states with such rules witnessed the horrific reality of allowing the legislature into the doctor's office (see: the case of Adriana Smith, a Georgia nurse who died in 2025 but nonetheless was forced to remain on life support as an incubation chamber after doctors discovered a nine-week fetus in her abdomen. Her family had no say in that matter).

The bad PR has led to a quiet stripping of pro-life policies from conservative platforms across the country, with the GOP futilely attempting to ditch the "pro-life" branding altogether in an effort to skirt more electoral losses.

National surveys indicate that the vast majority of the country supports abortion access. In a poll published by the Pew Research Center in March, 60 percent of respondents said abortion should be legal in pretty much all cases, while only 38 percent said it should be illegal in most cases.

Read more about abortion rights:

• The Accelerating Project to Extend Abortion Bans to All 50 States

Washington Voters Keep Millionaire Tax

Washington voters decided to keep their state's millionaire tax on Tuesday.

Fifty-eight percent of Washingtonians voted against Initiative 645, an effort to repeal the state's millionaire tax led by right-wing donors and PACs, including Let's Go Washington. The PAC, headed by conservative hedge fund executive Brian Heywood, was the most active group in the $13.1 million failed effort to overturn the 9.9 percent tax on income over $1 million a year.

"I can't tell you how many people have left the state," Heywood [told](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202...

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